Although the Nevada tourist season for 1948 will be a thing of the past and the high passes of the Sierras blocked with snow for the winter by the time this achieves print, readers of GOURMET may post it among their futures for next summer that during its brief season Nevada is possessed of wonderments which have no peer even in Colorado, long a Mecca of vacationists. Because of its brief summer, vast desert distances, and general absence of resort attractions save at Lake Tahoe and Las Vegas, Nevada has not, until very recently, been a must in the schedules of well-to-do tourists, and Nevadans themselves take small profit and less pleasure out of the overexploited divorce trade. Except in the brassier spots of Reno, it isn't even visible.
But discerning folk have lately been discovering Nevada's fantastic mountains and deserts, its superlative system of highways, and the wistful souvenirs of yesterday to be encountered in Virginia City and its other ghost towns which only yesterday were roaring metropolises. During the past summer there were more pilgrims than ever before who rode the legendary Virginia and Truckee Railroad, a pastoral pike whose operations haven't discernibly changed since the seventies, discovered the antique shops of Virginia City's fabulous C Street, and dined in the Sky Room of Reno's new and glittering Mapes Hotel.
Except perhaps for Colorado's Central City and the inaccessible Leadville, Virginia City is, of course, the most romantic ghost town in the continent and, while its fabled Comstock Lode has long since ceased mining operations on any important scale, it has uncovered a minor but still paying bonanza in the tourist trade. On week ends especially, its saloons and roulette parlors are populated with paying customers who have tooled up the Geiger Grade from Steamboat Springs to goggle at the chandeliers in the Crystal Saloon, have a whirl of the wheel at the table where once millions were lost and won in the Washoe Club, and buy Victorian cruet sets and coal oil lamps from Florence Edwards' antique shop in the Silver Dollar Hotel.
The opening, too, of the Bonanza Inn, previously reported by this department, in a stately old Virginia City mansion by Ginny and Halvor Smedsrud has been a tremendous drawing card, and Nevadans and trippers alike have been enchanted to find frogs' legs provençale, snails bourguignonne, and other elements of classic French cuisine high in the ghost-haunted slopes of Mount Davidson. The premises are as informal as can be imagined with guests drinking with the management, wandering in and out of the kitchen, helping to maintain fires in the restaurant's open fireplaces, while Mrs. Smedsrud prepares dinner with a wooden spoon in one hand and a glass of bourbon in the other. When she writes the inevitable cookbook, she says it will be entitled: Cooking with Bourbon. The Bonanza's drinks confected by Douglas Moore, Yale '41, are quite in keeping with the formidable legend of Virginia's once famed International Hotel and Sazarac Saloon.
Make no mistake about it: Nevada, whether you prefer the dusty glories of the Comstock with their inescapable overtones of the golden past, or the whoopla of the Last Frontier down at Las Vegas, is increasingly on the pleasure map of the United States. But its principal charm is that it hasn't yet been overexploited, that it is possible to drive for an hour at a time on its incomparable desert highways without passing another car, and that its resorts are just as robust and uninhibited as they were when the bonanza kings were rolling over the Virginia and Truckee in their private Silver Palace cars and when Hank Monk was frightening the whiskers off Uncle Horace Greeley by skirting the breathless abysses of the King's Canyon Grade with his six horses at a dead gallop.
Pinterest
